This second sequel to MGM's Shaft (1971) brings back star Richard Roundtree without the backup of director Gordon Parks or screenwriter Ernest Tidyman (author of the 1970 source novel and writer on both the original film and its first sequel, Shaft's Big Score [1972]. Cognizant of the diminishing vogue for "blaxploitation films," Shaft in Africa (1973) hews closer to the still-profitable James Bond franchise by having the eponymous Harlem sleuth sent to expose a modern day African slave trade, at first going undercover in the crowded hull of a slave ship and then dodging assassins' bullets when his cover is blown. (The hero is even given a spycam camouflaged inside a walking stick, delivered by the Q-like Marne Maitland.) Scripted by Stirling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night [1967]) and directed by John Guillermin (whose trendsetting spaghetti western El Condor [1970] had boasted an emancipated and capable black hero in pro footballer turned actor Jim Brown), Shaft in Africa is taut and satisfying, shot on location in France and Ethiopia by veteran cinematographer Marcel Grignon (Is Paris Burning? [1966]), and featuring Vonetta McGee (The Great Silence [1970]) and Frank Finlay (The Three Musketeers [1974]) as Shaft's love interest and main adversary, respectively. Not as successful as the first two Shaft films, Shaft in Africa led to a short-lived CBS-TV series, again starring Roundtree, which ran for seven 70-minute episodes between October 1973 and February 1974.

By Richard Harland Smith